School of Medicine

New research from the School of Medicine raises the prospect that some cancer patients with aggressive tumors may benefit from a class of anti-inflammatory drugs currently in use against rheumatoid arthritis.

A novel antibiotic delivery system would exploit small molecules called siderophores that bacteria secrete to scavenge for iron in their environments. Each bacterium has its own system of siderophores, which it pumps across its cell membrane before releasing the iron the siderophores hold. If an antibiotic were linked to one of these scavenger molecules, it would be converted into a tiny Trojan horse that would smuggle antibiotics inside a bacterium’s cell membrane.

Signals from the immune system that help repel a common parasite inadvertently can cause a dormant viral infection to become active again, a new study from the School of Medicine shows. Pictured is a helminth parasite.

The Shell Café in the McDonnell Sciences Building and the Farrell Café in the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center on the School of Medicine campus will be closed June 27 and 30. The cafes will reopen July 1 under new management.

Vision researchers from 38 clinical sites, including the School of Medicine, have found that the eyesight of patients with an unusual vision disorder linked to obesity improves twice as much if they take a glaucoma drug and lose a modest amount of weight than if they only lose weight. Neuro-ophthalmologist Gregory Van Stavern, MD, led the study in St. Louis.

Studying mouth cancer in mice, researchers led by Ravindra Uppaluri, MD, PhD, have found a way to predict the aggressiveness of similar tumors in people, an early step toward a diagnostic test that could guide treatment.

Studying children with autism and their parents, researchers have found that when a child has autism, his or her parents are more likely to have autistic traits than parents who don’t have a child with an autism spectrum disorder, as measured by a survey used to identify such characteristics. Pictured is one of the study’s authors, John Constantino, MD.

Pirooz Eghtesady, MD, PhD, has been named the first Emerson Chair in Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. He is a professor of surgery and of pediatrics and is chief of the section of Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery at the School of Medicine.

New research from the School of Medicine’s Albert Kim, MD, PhD (left), and Hiroko Yano, PhD, helps explain how mutations in the gene that causes Huntington’s disease kill brain cells. The findings could open new opportunities for treating the fatal disorder.

School of Medicine researchers have identified the first genetic variations linked to race that begin to explain a higher risk of death among some African American and Caucasian patients taking the anti-clotting drug clopidogrel (Plavix) after a heart attack.